3 Enterprise Technologies That Will Rule in 2018

A new year always brings in new technologies and trends that enterprises everywhere are quick to eat up. While these change every year, many are trends that started the previous year and carried over. Case in point, artificial intelligence (AI). AI has been a hot topic in recent years, with many new technologies stemming from it, and it’s poised to take the spotlight again in 2018. In fact, Gartner predicts that by 2020, AI will be a top five priority for more than 30% of CIOs.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at enterprise technology 2018 strategies need. And as it happens to be, these technologies all revolve around AI.

1: Voice Assistants

Voice assistants are becoming more and more popular in the business world every day. With them, employees can be more productive as they conversationally interact with them, giving them more time to focus on more important tasks.

For example, Amazon recently announced Alexa for Business, saying that it will help organizations solve the problem of wasted time due to tedious tasks like managing calendars, dialing into meetings, or searching for information:

Alexa lets people use their voice to interact with technology so they can spontaneously ask questions in a way that feels natural. Alexa can help people take care of these tasks just by asking. Alexa can help people stay organized and focused on the things that matter, whether they are working in their office or at home. Alexa can simplify conference rooms, allowing meeting attendees to start meetings and control the equipment in the room by simply using their voice. Alexa can also do things around the workplace, like providing directions to a conference room, notifying IT about a broken printer, or placing an order for office supplies.

2: Big Data and Analytics

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It seems that a prerequisite for being an enterprise is handling a lot of data — it just can’t be helped. While tedious to make sense of this data, it’s absolutely vital because it reflects the decisions and consequences of said decisions. For example, an eCommerce can analyze customer data to make sense of purchasing behavior, which can help them tailor their strategies for the future.

There is, therefore, a need to manage, analyze, and extrapolate information from data, which will help enterprises aid in the decision-making process. This is where big data and analytics programs that make sense of it come into play. It’s 2018 and enterprises that previously sidestepped the big data trends are revising their strategies to prepare for the influx of insights they can glean from the mountains of numbers and statistics piling on at their doorstep.

3: Automation

Finally, a third technology AI promotes that will rule in 2018 is automation. The thing is, tasks that can be automated are usually repetitive, routine and time-consuming, which is why the automation trend is definitely continuing from 2017. With machines taking over lower level tasks, more manpower can be devoted to those that require a human touch, which then functions to reduce overall labor costs and lower error rates.

And as Information Age points out, a report by ServiceNow found that highly automated companies are 6x more likely to experience revenue growth of more than 15% when compared to companies with low automation. In other words, if you’re not automating you’re not only missing out on possible growth, but also placing yourself at risk of being overtaken by your competition.

Final Thoughts and TL;DR

Artificial intelligence is reshaping business and the enterprise as a whole. It makes data easy to understand, allows for accurate predictions, and leads to simplified processes that free up resources. That’s why today we covered AI-based enterprise technology 2018 will see. From voice assistants to automation, these technologies were present in 2017 and will see an even bigger presence in 2018:

1.Voice assistants allow employees to conversationally interact with technology, saving time so they can focus on more important tasks
2.Big data and analytics help the enterprise make sense of their internal and external interactions while extracting important information to aid the decision-making process
3.Automation reduces labor costs and allows organizations to devote more manpower to higher level tasks